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What our clients say

Occasionally we discover an organization and people who are special. Zenith Cleaners is much more than the usual cleaning company. First, it has extraordinary leaders. Tolu and Roni align everything they do with their values of excellent service and care for our environment. Second, Zenith Cleaners has become their vehicle for the development and connection of people who they bring together from all walks of life to form meaningful relationships. Third, they have created a learning organization that leaves everyone with whom they come in contact intellectually and emotionally richer. Zenith has cleaned our home for more than eight years and we feel blessed to have Tolu and Roni in our lives.

Lynn HarrisConcept13

I have never cleaned so much since my relationship with Zenith Cleaners commenced but in a completely different way. I am no longer cleaning to get my place clean but cleaning to dive deeply into my world and to bring joy to my family as they step into the luminous space called “home"

Christine RushworthTrillium Montreal

For the last 5 years – Zenith Cleaners have been committed to Communauto in the upkeep of our head office in Montreal. They have been flexible with our needs and their work is done professionally; discreetly and with products that are friendly to the environement. We appreciate that it just takes a phone call to discuss an issue and it’s fixed. Zenith is great for any last minute changes or special requests, we continue to use their services and highly recommend other companies to do so as well.

Tolu and Ronke see Zenith Cleaners as a vehicle through which they can create the kind of world they want to live in, a world that is not just healthy and aesthetically beautiful, but deeply rooted in caring relationships and personal growth…more

The potential for a sane, balanced integration of self, art and work has always been a prerequisite for me when searching for a new workplace. But unfortunately, in today’s job market, largely driven by vainglorious racketeers and their abstracted, stilted sense of human engagement (who among us hasn’t worn the goofy badge and been told to liven up, smile obsequiously?) this ideal has perhaps never felt more elusive. I confess to having not gotten much further than the initial job search itself only to feel my hopes collapse into a kind of hopeless idealistic tangle out of sync with the “real world”.

Zenith is one the few companies I’ve worked with that get it. That people, allowed to abide in themselves and a task fully, often thrive much more than they would if they were alienated from that task and themselves. For me cleaning became a kind of psychogeographic exercise. I’d gain access to places I’d never otherwise, become intimately involved with the lives of co-workers and clients I couldn’t consider in the same way afterwards, scavenge histories from dust and imagine the palimpsests of spaces.

All of this goes along with a tremendous intimacy, a responsibility whose contours have a refreshing solidity, what you might call an ethics of care. It is a bizarre and humbling thing to clean a toilet in a historic church for instance, don your cleaning gloves and simultaneously marvel at the architecture and the lives that must have passed through it. At Zenith I never daydreamed, and never felt the need; rather, I focused and felt a deep attention span welling that could accommodate my thoughts and which was honed through cleaning as practice. All employees should be so lucky. As should other companies pay heed.

We have been using Zenith for a few years now in our business and they do a wonderful job. They are super reliable, friendly and efficient! Plus they use all eco friendly products that smell oh so wonderful!

"Thank you so much for welcoming me so quickly, warmly and openly to Zenith and allowing me to take part in your inspiring work.

Zenith has completely changed my attitude, approach and way of talking about cleaning. It has been a very fulfilling experience to practice cleaning in people's homes - especially for all such kind/interesting people that have respect for the approach and philosophy."

Sitara RahiStaff

Tolu has guided me in Cleaning as Practice twice: once as an individual and once as part of a working team. In both cases, I found the experience wonderful in more ways I can list, all of them surprising. It was refreshing to use all of my body - I spend most of my days sitting at a computer or talking in meetings. It was amazing to feel love literally blossom in my heart as I cleaned in caring service of those who use the space. I enjoyed the challenge of finding dirt and of revealing beauty (as Tolu says), even (especially!) in hard to reach places.

It was delightful to lose myself in the task, to allow my mind to wander, and then to notice where it wandered. I became more aware of my patterns of thought. some of which I actively chose to redirect toward something more positive. In other cases, without really trying, I was able to untangle my thoughts to find clarity and insight.

In the group cleaning, I loved looking up to find a colleague inviting me into a shared task. We brought care and intention into our work and it breathed new life into our space and also into our relationship. At the end, we all expressed the deep pride we felt as we stood in a space that not only looked better - it felt better. Rather than a dirty chore or a shameful position, cleaning became a joy, a way of expressing our care for each other and for our space and our work

Michelle HollidayCo-Founder, Thrivable World Quest

Cleaning as Practice was a very humbling experience, which was good, but didn't always feel good - especially the night I finished two cleaning shifts and went out to a restaurant alone on a Saturday night in downtown Montreal, wearing my cleaning uniform. They say it's good to walk in someone else's shoes. I think it's good to wear someone else's uniform, but it's not always comfortable, or pretty.

I was also surprised by how connected I felt when I cleaned a house. It's an intimate thing to do, to clean someone else's home. You're surrounded by all their stuff, their photos... It surprised me that I could feel that connected to a family that I didn't really know.

I learned a lot by getting to know the other cleaners, and they helped me to look at my life and work in a new light. Honestly, I learned the most by getting to know you, Tolu. You helped me to experience what connects us as human beings, and what keeps us separated -- and all the crazy ways we distinguish important work from unimportant work. Meaningful work from menial work. And you helped me get unstuck.

After I finished Cleaning As Practice, when I was thinking about why the experience was so powerful for me, I realized that the practices that lead to learning and innovation are the same things we have to do as outsiders: ask questions, listen well, learn from people with different perspectives, experiment, make mistakes, develop resilience, learn that it's okay to feel uncomfortable, and learn to see things in a new light.

Deb NelsonExecutive Director, Social Venture Network

I had a tremendous experience hearing from Tolulope and Zenith Cleaners. While I was thrown off at first by the fact that someone was presenting to us about “cleaning”, and that he actually meant house cleaning, surface cleaning and what have you! When you are used to Ernst & Young executives coming in to show you the latest trends in venture shares for major IPOs, talk about consulting for Wal-Mart and trying to sell their company as the smartest kid on the block. And there we had a guy in his thirties telling us about cleaning… It made me take a step back.

I was confused when he first started telling his story: how could a McGill grad, especially a Desautels MBA graduate, have become a house cleaner? Isn’t that the type of employment that we worked so hard to avoid?? However, Tolulope’s definition of cleaning got me hooked on what he was saying: “Cleaning is the process of removing dirt from any space, surface, object or subject thereby exposing beauty, potential, truth and sacredness”. My initial reaction was along the lines of “I’m not sure what kind of drugs he took to arrive to that statement but it must have been powerful”.

But as I started listening to him, I realized that the notions of stigma that were associated with the job were the reasons I reacted so violently to his opening lines. I did have a prejudice against this type of work. It was not necessarily my fault, as I didn’t know this type of work that well, it simply was natural for me to assume that a cleaner was someone that didn’t have the chance to get an education, and was therefore “relegated” to cleaning other people’s mess.

One of the sentences that resonated with me was along the lines of cleaning being a must. It is an action we all have to do. It is not glamourous, nor is it well viewed by society. However it can be gratifying in ways other employment never would. Tolu managed to link this to the superfluous aspect of many jobs. Cleaning was at least something more essential than marketing for example. I immediately associated this prejudice I had against cleaners to the ones people might have against farmers, or other forms of employment considered “bottom of the chain” or “dirty”. It made me realize that without them, the ones that were built on these foundations would crumble and eventually fall. If what is at the roots of a society becomes cast out, its very foundations tremble.